www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org
Date: 11/16/2013 3:31:37 PM
GAMALIEL FOUNDATION (GF)
221 North LaSalle - Suite 1320
Chicago IL
60601
Phone :(312) 357-2639
Fax :(312) 300-4722
Email :info@gamaliel.org
URL :http://www.gamaliel.org
- Network of grassroots organizations working to bring about social change
- Models its tactics after those of the radical Sixties activist Saul Alinsky
The Gamaliel Foundation (GF) was
established in 1968
to support the Contract Buyers League, an African-American organization
that advocated on behalf of black Chicago homeowners who had been
discriminated against by lending institutions. GF
derived its name
from a Pharisee who, according to the New Testament, chastised the
Jewish Sanhedrin (rabbinical court) for seeking to execute Jesus's
apostles.
When
former Jesuit priest Gregory Galluzzo became the foundation's executive director in 1986, Gamaliel was
restructured
as a community-organizing leadership institute that focused on training
activists “to build and maintain powerful organizations in low-income
communities.” GF has since grown into a
network of
faith-based community-organizing affiliates with
branches in 18 U.S. states, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.[1]
Like the Gamaliel Foundation itself, GF's affiliates
carefully select non-threatening names
that form biblical acronyms. Michigan, for instance, has the Interfaith
Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community (ISAAC); a
Wisconsin affiliate is called Joining Our Neighbors, Advancing Hope
(JONAH); and a New York affiliate is named Niagara Organizing Alliance
for Hope (NOAH).
In the mid-1980s, Galluzzo served as a
mentor for a young
Barack Obama
during the latter's organizing days in Chicago. The Developing
Communities Project, where Obama first worked as an organizer, was (and
still is) part of the Gamaliel network.
By early 1988, Obama
had become
a consultant for, and a trainer of, GF community organizers; he would
maintain his ties to Gamaliel throughout his years in the U.S. Senate.
As Galluzzo
said
shortly after Obama was elected President in 2008: “Barack has
acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel
affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting
training [and attending] our public meetings.”
In 2001, Dennis Jacobsen, director of
Gamaliel's National Clergy Caucus, published Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing,
a handbook/ideological guide for GF's religious organizers. Depicting
the U.S. as a “sick society” in need of radical transformation, this
text derides America's free-market system for allegedly harming the
poor. The author affirms that GF's goal is to foment public anger and
“shake the foundations of this society.” Though he never mentions
socialism explicitly, Jacobsen
praises
the communal property arrangements of the early Christians and the
“radical sharing” practiced by various African groups. A self-described
“radical Christian,” Jacobsen
acknowledges
that he has “deep prejudices ... against wealthy people.” He contends
that Christians who view America as a just society are plagued by “false
consciousness” --
a Marxist construct.
Gamaliel today offers
more than 100 training events per year,
teaching
“techniques and methodologies that have worked in rural, urban,
suburban, white, Black, Hispanic and working-class communities.” The
foundation's seven-day residential training events use the “Socratic”
method to promote an “agitational” approach to community organizing,
modeled on the tactics of the late
Saul Alinsky. GF has also developed training programs geared specifically toward
clergy and
women.
According to
Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts, who has studied GF
extensively, Gamaliel's organizers engage freely in ideological talk
when speaking privately among themselves, but they carefully avoid such
talk during their trainings so as not to alienate working-class people.
In those settings, the organizers present their ideas as pragmatic,
“commonsense solutions” for “working families.”
GF and its affiliates focus their training and activist efforts on the following major
issues[2]:
- Civil Rights of Immigrants:
Lamenting the inequities of America's “broken immigration system” that
“has separated [i.e., split apart] countless families and compromised
the dignity of millions of decent people,” GF calls for expanded rights
and ultimately a path to citizenship for all illegals currently residing
in the United States. In January 2010, GF launched a "National Prayer
Vigil Campaign to win Comprehensive Immigration Reform," an initiative
where activists held weekly public prayer vigils in front of the offices
of members of Congress.
- Health Care: Citing Jesus's call for his apostles “to cure diseases” and “to heal”
the sick, GF contends that government-financed “health care Is a
God-given right” that “should be guaranteed to everyone living in the
United States.” “Economic and racial disparities in access to health
care,” adds GF, are a particular affront to “the will of God.”
- Transportation Equity Network:
Asserting that “inequities in transportation create barriers to
opportunity, access, and full participation in the life of the
community,” GF has launched a project called the Transportation Equity
Network consisting of more than 350 community organizations in 41
states. This initiative lobbies for “increased [government] funding for
mass transit” and the creation of “more transportation-related jobs for
disadvantaged people” in “underserved, low-income communities.”
- Jobs and Economic Development:
GF and the Transportation Equity Network created the JOBS NOW campaign,
which “aims [to] get thousands of high-paying jobs” for “low-income
people, minorities, women, and ex-offenders through workforce
development agreements and policies.”
- Opportunity Housing:
Challenging “the entrenched system of separatism and segregation of the
poor in America,” GF promotes “fair share housing,” whereby “all
communities within a metropolitan area should include their fair share
of the region’s low income housing and affordable housing.”
GF's modus operandi is to
bring
local, inner-city churches into its fold, and then to pressure
political and corporate leaders to support Gamaliel's goals vis à vis
the foregoing issues.
Former GF community organizer Rey Lopez-Calderon
reports
that Gamaliel's “culture” is exceedingly “strange and warped.”
“[Gregory] Galluzzo,” says Calderon, “told me that he wanted organizers
to be tough bastards who could build power like the Conquistadors.”
Calderon further reveals that Galluzzo, in seminars, would teach
trainees to be “
ruthless” in actualizing the premise that “
the ends justify the means.”
GF receives much of its funding from the
Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Yet
according
to the Roman Catholic Faithful website, the foundation's “goals and
philosophies are at fundamental odds with Church teaching.” In March
2010, David Ricken -- the Roman Catholic bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin
--
said
that certain “principles of the Gamaliel Foundation are inconsistent
with the tenets of our Catholic Social Teaching.” Vicar general and
chancellor Father John Doerfler of Northeast Wisconsin
specified one particularly problematic GF doctrine: “The end,” he said, “does not justify the means.”
GF has also
received much financial support from the
Annie E. Casey Foundation,
the Arca Foundation, the
Bauman Family Foundation, the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, the
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the
Ford Foundation,
the Glaser Progress Foundation,
George Soros's
Open Society Institute, the
Public Welfare Foundation, the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the
Tides Foundation,
the Wieboldt Foundation, the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation,
and the
Woods Fund of Chicago.[3]
For a list of additional funders of GF,
click here.
In January 2011, veteran community organizer Ana Garcia-Ashley became GF's
new executive director, replacing Gregory Galluzzo, who had held the position for 24 years.
For additional infotmation on the Gamaliel Foundation,
click here.
NOTES:
[1] This was as of February 2011.
[2] These were GF's programs as of February 2011.
[3] Sources: the
Foundation Center; the
Capital Research Center; Stanley Kurtz,
Radical-in-Chief (2010)
Source
.
